I take full responsibility for my part in the demise of the once proud African airline called Air Afrique. It treated me well on a number of occasions, but I dissed it. Well, I dissed it because, in spite of all the good intentions and generally good service once you were aboard (although that’s debatable), the getting aboard thing was the major challenge.
Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent United States economist and a special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, argues in a new book that extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025. In The End of Poverty, he says much will depend on the choices made by Americans, who are paying a far smaller share of their income in foreign aid than they promised three years ago.
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s most successful investors, has launched his most withering attack to date on the United States trade deficit, describing Americans as ”rich spending junkies” who could turn into a nation of ”sharecroppers”.
No Kaizer Chiefs fans were among those injured in a stampede in Madagascar on Sunday during a soccer match between the South African team and the USJF Ravinala soccer club. International news agencies reported that 47 people were injured in the stampede. Six of them were reported to be in a coma.
Iran has hinted that it could follow North Korea in abrogating its nuclear pledges if Washington took the ayatollahs to the United Nations Security Council because of suspicions about its nuclear programmes. Speaking at a nuclear technology conference in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, voiced frustration with EU attempts to defuse the nuclear dispute.
The crimes of Croatia’s past are holding the country’s future hostage, a decade after the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia. Croatia’s most wanted war crimes suspect, a 49-year-old general, has been on the run for almost four years. Unless he is located and arrested within 10 days the European Union will refuse to open membership negotiations with Croatia.
A Bill against Taiwanese independence, which is to be put before the Chinese legislature, brought more than 15 000 protesters on to the streets of Taipei on Sunday, amid fears that it will be used by Beijing to justify military action. The contents of the anti-secession law will be made public later this week.
”Get with the programme,” says Maurice Rosenberg, race-car preparer and fleet vehicle management consultant. Along with Peter Prunzel, Rosenberg’s Strydom Park workshop has had to acquire the latest in electronic wizardry to help cope with the plethora of modern motor vehicles that boast advanced electronics.
The African music industry is in for a long overdue facelift. MTV base — MTV’s African music channel — kicked off with all the appropriate glitz and glamour last week. Nadine Botha takes a closer look.
Eight civil society bodies on Sunday urged President Thabo Mbeki and his Cabinet not to let the Directorate of Special Operations, commonly known as the Scorpions, to fall under the police’s control. They said the elite agency ”is unique in that it can analyse, investigate and prosecute” anyone irrespective of their public standing”.